On May 23, 2009, at 8:50 AM, pharrington wrote:
> Ruby apps are typically deployed as gems.

Monkeybars apps built with Rawr (the standard build tool) can go out  
as standalone .app and .exe files - no Ruby installation (let alone  
gems) are necessary.

> Yes, your source is as plain as day, but is that really *so* much  
> different than Java, given the
> ease of disassembling bytecode (and the numerous tools that do a
> fantastic job of it)?

Rawr by default compiles your app into Java bytecode. We have run a  
decompiler over JRuby's compiled code for hello world (puts "hello  
world") and found many lines of unreadable Java. Now go write a non- 
trivial application, and you have code that's obfuscated pretty well.

> Also bindings for just about every graphics
> toolkit known to man exist for Ruby, a simple google search will help
> you with that. One of the more interesting approaches to this though
> is http://shoooes.net/, you should give it a look.

Shoes is an interesting library, but if you're thinking of writing a  
standard GUI app with lots of UI widgets (such as tables, lists,  
buttons, text fields, etc), then I'd look elsewhere. Shoes tackles a  
different set of UI problems than your standard GUI framework. I've  
been paid to port Shoes apps that were trying to do what Monkeybars  
excels at, and it wasn't pretty to see how Shoes was doing it. Just to  
reiterate - Shoes isn't bad, it's just designed for something else.